There were two Hollywood-related moments that gladdened the heart over this past weekend. The first, obviously, was the glorious sight of the Oscar telecast end credits, the second was Kim Master’s “Slate” story reporting that Steven Spielberg’s long gestating passion project – an Abe Lincoln biopic, is all but dead. Steven Spielberg not making a film was good news. How things have changed in thirty years.
Anyone my age, anyone who was around ten years-old when “Jaws” hit theatres, remembers when the name “Spielberg” meant something magical. From childhood straight through to my mid-twenties, Spielberg was what the joy of movies was all about. Not only did he direct four of the greatest films in the history of American cinema: “Jaws,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “E.T.,” but as a producer his name was attached to such crowd pleasers as “Used Cars,” “Poltergeist,” “Gremlins,” “The Goonies,” “Innerspace,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” and the “Back to the Future” trilogy.
To say the least, this was quite a run and then in 1993 he achieved something no other filmmaker of his generation ever came close to. He brought to the screen both the ultimate popcorn thrill-ride with “Jurassic Park” and a full-blown masterpiece with “Schindler’s List.”
At this point Spielberg had nowhere to go but down, and down he went. Whether or not he’s lost a bit of his filmmaking mojo is for another debate. The issue here is one of moral maturity.
My disenchantment with Spielberg began about 90-minutes into “Saving Private Ryan,” a film that treats the American soldier with respect, but refused to acknowledge the country that produced that soldier. It’s Tom Sizemore’s sympathetic character who speaks the film’s theme out loud:
“But another part of me thinks that if by some miracle we stay and actually make it out of here. Some day we might look back on this and decide that saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole God awful shitty mess….”
That “God awful shitty mess” is WWII and no one – not the characters, not the film itself — argues that maybe another “decent thing we were able to pull out” was saving the world at a terrible cost to both ourselves and our allies.
Then there’s “Munich,” a film so morally illiterate in its examination of Israel’s right to protect itself, you would never believe the same individual created “Schindler’s List.”
And finally, let’s not forget Spielberg’s willingness to help China put a fairytale Olympic facade on a country with one of the worst human rights records in modern history. It was only a very public shaming started by Mia Farrow that put an end to that nonsense. The Commie bad guys in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Worst Sequel Without The Word ‘Boogaloo’ in the Title” were make believe. He should be so offended by real ones.
We should be pleased Spielberg may not get to make his Lincoln biopic because his moral blindness makes it impossible to understand an individual as complex and historic as Abraham Lincoln, a man willing to go so far as to destroy America in order to save it. The essence of Lincoln was that he was driven by the knowledge that without America the world was doomed, and so he would preserve it at any cost. If you can’t grasp that, you can’t grasp Lincoln, and Useful Idiots for Communist countries are immediately suspect. That “Munich” screenwriter Tony Kushner, who has made some outrageously negative statements about Israel, is credited with having written the “Lincoln” script is beyond comprehension.
Who would have ever guessed that a man — second only to Walt Disney — once associated with the purest joys of escapism and the pinnacle of pure filmmaking, is now associated with the very worst of modern day Hollywood. No one can take the magic out of your name. You can only give it away.
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